Transmission #27: Plastic, Sculpted Houses, the Trouble with Web3, Whale Warnings and the ol' Ludwig Van.
Design, ideas and other flotsam
Hello. Welcome to the first edition for 2022!
Thanks for all the kind messages – it’s great to hear from you all, and I hope you have a wonderful 2022. Or at least one that’s better than 2021!
This is Transmissions by me, Martin Brown. Father. Husband. Design Lead at Craig Walker, sometime lecturer at RMIT. Marty to most.
This is an ongoing fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, quotes and other curios that float my way.
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If you want to read the best of Transmissions from 2021, check out the link here.
The mysteries of odour, the 100 year plan for getting humans to mars, mycelial threads, master bladesmiths, inner monologues of bickering italians, and the slow demise of musical genre.
Take a look back at some of the most curious stories of the year!
Design
How Plastic Liberated and Entombed Us
Jeannette Cooperman, The Common Reader
A drifting, contemplative piece about plastic, which has ridden the waves of public popularity over the 20th century, and now, in the 21st, finds itself a pariah in the battle for a more sustainable future. This ambling essay explores not so much the economic or environmental intricacies, but rather feels like a search for the soul of plastic.
“When celebrated for its own sake, the material could still be cool, but most plastic products were fakes, imitations of finer substances, at first trying too hard to pass and then not even trying, just laying themselves out there as our only option.”
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“By the seventies, the fruit in the fruit bowl was plastic; the flowers in the centerpiece were plastic; lampshades stayed encased in plastic; the food in restaurant display cases was uncanny-valley plastic. Some of this was a class thing: plastic belonged to that tasteless wide swath of middle America, where you could afford just enough to pretend.”
The Steel House Saga: One Man’s Masterpiece Is Another’s Airbnb
Rainey Knudson, Texas Monthly
I love quixotic stories of strange houses, and the fervour and passion that overtakes their builders. A recent issue of the magazine MacGuffin has a wonderful series on ‘bottle-houses’ that I highly recommend. This story though is the tale of Robert Bruno, and the house he built himself, made almost entirely out of quarter-inch Corten steel.
“He devised a homemade hydraulic crane that lifted him twenty feet off the ground in a makeshift chair. He would drive out to the site in his pickup truck, hoist himself up in the crane, and sit suspended inches from the surface of the house, studying every weld and every seam, tearing apart and rebuilding whole sections as he saw fit.”
Ideas
Where Is Today's Beethoven?
Holden Karnofsky, Cold Takes
A data-centric view from the founder of the non-profit, GiveWell. Holden notes that whilst we continue to produce scientific and artistic genius, we appear to be underperforming compared to the past, given our increases in population and prosperity. Despite that latest trend piece you read about the exponential speed of change, we’re actually in an innovation stagnation.
Why might that be? Is it that people were simply better during our ‘golden ages’ of innovation? Is it that we tend to look more fondly on the past, and just can’t believe that someone as erratic as Kanye might just be – literally – one of the best ever? Or is it that innovation is more like mining – it gets harder the further we go?
Karnofsky attacks the question with loads and loads of data. Some of it feels a little spurious (how exactly should one quantify the intrinsic value of art?). Some of it is highly persuasive.
Karnofsky is scrupulous in his listing of data sources and methods – yet I think he’s missing the point by focusing mostly on the supply-side of genius. There’s an interplay with the flows and eddies of culture that’s required for genius to flourish and become adopted, adored and imitated – the demand-side, let’s call it. We only have the capacity to absorb one Kanye at a time, and the worldwide distribution stream called the internet means he’s accessible to anyone, anywhere, and so it doesn’t matter that there’s only one. Additionally, there’s the further critique that there’s all sorts of questions around ‘who’s actually writing the history anyway’ when we look back beyond a few decades.
Still, it’s a valiant attempt to explore a fascinating topic.
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On a related topic comes this enlightening and rather depressing post by the music writer Ted Gioia, who notes that all the growth in recent years in popular music sales and streams is being driven by old music. Old songs now represent 70% of the US music market - and that number is steadily growing. People are caring less and less about new music.
It lends credence to Karnosfy’s theory that in many fields we have perhaps past the peak of artistic innovation, but the question of a decline in actual musical quality (‘I like your old stuff better than your new stuff’) vs other technological and music business factors is a trickier one to answer.
Quotes
There has been a marked homogenization of society since the industrial revolution, but especially in the last few decades with globalization and digitization. But programmers will not inherit the earth and the digital is not a substitute for the real. The familiar pathways of Silicon Valley optimists will not suffice. Emergent elites who are ready to upend the established order must be comfortable breaking its rules.
– Avetis Muradyan, The Secret is Crime, Palladium Magazine.
Chart of the Week
Other
🐋 A study suggests that in the 1800s, whales learnt to evade hunters by communicating with each other. Link
🎨 Movie’s are getting sludgier in their colour palettes. Blame a counter-reaction to early digital filmmaking in the 2000s. And blame the Matrix. Link
💿 Will NFTs and web3 be the economic panacea that the music industry has so desperately been seeking? Maybe, but it’s harder for music than visual art. “While all the technical requirements to make generative/PFP music NFTs work exist, the social, cultural and legal foundations arguably do not.”
Link
🔗 More web3: Signal founder and cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike weighs in with an interesting perspective. Counter to the much vaunted promise of a decentralised internet, he sees web3 leading to more centralisation, rather than less, mainly due to normal people wanting to offload complexity of the technology onto platforms like MetaMask and OpenSea. Link
🧠 One for the humans. Despite the exponential growth in compute power, the rise of AI-led science still has a while to go before we get to a ‘post-theory’ world, where we have solutions, but not understanding. Link
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